Column: Alabama vote was a tribute to our better angels

Sunday

Dec 17, 2017 at 5:00 AM

When the news broke late Tuesday evening that Democratic Alabama Senate candidate Doug Jones won the race against his Republican opponent, Roy Moore, four names began instantly appearing in my Twitter and Facebook news feeds: Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson and Denise McNair. These were the young black girls who were killed in the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama by members of the Ku Klux Klan on September 15, 1963.

Jones prosecuted two of the Klansmen — Thomas Blanton, Jr. and Bobby Frank Cherry — while he was U.S. attorney in Birmingham and helped block the early release of Blanton last year. With Jones being a hero in a civil-rights murder case whose wounds still run deep in Alabama after more than 50 years, it was not shocking that he won 96 percent of the African American vote. These were Obama-like numbers that were critical even though RealClearPolitics showed Moore with an estimated 2 percent lead several days before the election.

As I followed the Alabama race and thought about my own southern roots — I’m originally from Georgia — Moore just seemed like a political relic, and a scary one at that. His comments at a September campaign rally in Florence, Ala. — that our nation was at its best during the era of slavery, when he believed families loved each other and “were united” and “our country had a direction” — practically sealed his fate with the majority of black voters. The South was greatly lacking in moral direction in 1860, when nearly 4 million of its population were considered chattel.

Moore did acknowledge the racial progress we have made since the civil-rights movement and admitted that we still have prejudice, but he failed to mention the systemic racism that is very much embedded in the governing policies that shape our criminal-justice, educational and political institutions. The criminal-justice system is a particularly glaring example. Looking at Alabama, more than half of the prison population is African American and 1 in 25 black males is behind bars, according to 2016 data provided by The Sentencing Project.

Alabama also has a deep history of secession laws that were implemented right after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling to avoid integration of its public schools. Earlier this year, Judge Madeline Haikala of the U.S. District Court in Birmingham sided with the predominately white northern suburb of Gardendale and ruled that it could separate from the Jefferson County school system. Gardendale would have had a three-year probationary period to put desegregation guidelines into place beginning with two elementary schools this year, but the case is being reviewed in the U.S. 11th Circuit Court of Appeals. Haikala’s decision is being interpreted as a dangerous precedent for other states in the Deep South despite her orders for racial inclusion.

Alabama always seems to be moving in a retrogressive circle when it comes to civil rights and social justice, and as a Senate candidate, Moore was largely viewed as an anachronistic representation of a bigoted past. When thinking about what’s currently going on in Gardendale, Birmingham’s ongoing struggle reminds me of the 1963 Children’s Crusade, when Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference successfully organized black youth to march for desegregation of schools, downtown stores and other public institutions. Birmingham was and continues to be an epicenter for civil rights, and residents of its urban counties showed up heavily at the polls to vote for Jones.

It is clear that Alabama voters, both black and white, wanted a different and progressive vision, an agenda from someone who understands the complexities of racial and systemic inequality. Overall, 30 percent of whites backed Jones, and he did very well among young adults, winning 60 percent of the vote of those between the ages of 18 to 29. This is encouraging for a state that is still fighting its civil-rights battles from the '50s and '60s.